Young Abraham Lincoln: Child of the American Frontier（转载）
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky. White Americans had not been in that territory for long. King George III of England had declared, nearly half a century earlier, that the colonists under his rule were to keep themselves to the east of the Appalachian Mountains and thus avoid stirring up conflict with the Indian peoples of what are now the Ohio Valley and what used to be called the Northwest, meaning Indiana and Michigan. The king’s rule had rankled land-hungry Americans and, indeed, had been one of many causes for complaint that eventually led to the Revolution, whose memory was still fresh when Lincoln came into the world, a time when tens of thousands of settlers crossed the mountains.
Abraham was part of a westward process. His whole family had been part of that process for decades, ever since an Englishman named Samuel Lincoln had landed in Massachusetts in 1637. For the next eight generations his descendants tracked southward into New Jersey and Pennsylvania, then westward into Pennsylvania and Virginia, then finally into Kentucky—where the Indians, indeed, were not particularly happy to see them.
Fighting ensued, but in time the frontier quieted, only to be opened to land speculators, traders, lawyers. Those were the very people that the chronically impoverished, star-crossed farmer Thomas Lincoln had kept on moving to avoid. One of Abraham’s earliest memories was a flash flood that came sweeping down Knob Creek and wiped out his father’s crop of corn and beans. What Abraham did not know was that his father had not filed a proper claim on the land he was farming, and in 1816, when Abraham was just seven years old, a neighbor who knew the law filled out the proper paperwork and forced the Lincolns from their homestead.
The neighbors knew Thomas for a hard-luck case, and they whispered about his wife, Nancy Hanks, who, they said, had been born out of wedlock and never knew her father. Nancy did not much care for them, either. She had a hard view of life and a sad disposition, and she read her Bible constantly, convinced that any reward she was likely to receive would be in another life. Her son would inherit her melancholy nature, but Nancy was a good and loving mother all the same.
Thomas moved the family across the Ohio River, to where he and they were strangers. He found unclaimed property in the thickly forested limestone country some 60 miles west of what was then the capital of Indiana Territory, a little town called Corydon. Indiana became a state, folklore holds, on the very day that the Lincolns arrived: December 11, 1816. Abraham never knew the exact date, though, for his mother told him only that they crossed the river sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas of that cold year.
Thomas Lincoln was not an ambitious man, not driven to acquire wealth and consume things, but he was willing to work hard for his family. On the banks of Pigeon Creek, he cleared a couple of acres of sandy land, planted corn, built a chicken coop and a pigpen, and set to work putting up a log cabin very much like the one in which Abraham had been born. We moderns tend to think of log cabins as rickety, drafty, creaky affairs, but that is because we know them mostly as ruins; in fact, the one that Thomas built was small but sturdy and for the most part weatherproof, providing shelter from the bitter cold winters and the sweltering summers alike. Visitors to the site, what is now the Abraham Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial near Lincoln City, Indiana, can see for themselves what a good job Thomas did. There the homestead is maintained as the Lincolns would have known it, with a living-history museum housed in a cabin built on the exact plan of the original, which was torn down in the 1920s.
If Thomas was not ambitious in the strictest sense, he and Nancy recognized that in Abraham they had a talented and diligent son. Nancy encouraged him to read and taught him to write, and the Lincolns did not seem to mind that Abraham scrawled all over every available surface with charcoal, developing in time confident penmanship that served him well when, as a young man, he set out as a law clerk.
Nancy Hanks died young, as so many did on the frontier; illness took her at the age of 35, when Abraham was just shy of 10. He buried his grief in two forms that would characterize him in adulthood: he read, and he worked—carving, among other things, the wooden pegs that would seal his mother’s coffin lid shut. Young Abraham threw himself into books, reading and rereading such favorites as Aesop’s Fables and The Arabian Nights. Along with the Bible, the former equipped him with a stock of moral lessons with which he would pepper his legal arguments and speeches in the years to come; the latter gave him a treasure trove of stories that he could entertain listeners with over the fire of an evening, and storytelling was a talent much prized in those days before mass entertainment came along.
When he was about 12, Abraham happened upon a book that would have a profound influence on him: the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, who worked his way out of poverty to become one of the leaders of his revolutionary generation. Franklin set an example for young Abraham, who had been none too ambitious himself. Now he burned with a determination to improve himself constantly, never waste a moment, and become somebody.
That program of self-improvement met with a naturally good character. By the time Abraham was ready to leave the Pigeon Creek homestead, he stood 6′4″ and cut an instantly recognizable figure. “All old settlers,” one neighbor remarked years later, “will testify to the uniform urbanity, integrity of character, industry, and good sense that characterized his boyhood.” There on the American frontier, Abraham Lincoln acquired the fine qualities that would distinguish him as a man—and for which he is so rightly honored to this day.
Abraham was part of a westward process. His whole family had been part of that process for decades, ever since an Englishman named Samuel Lincoln had landed in Massachusetts in 1637. For the next eight generations his descendants tracked southward into New Jersey and Pennsylvania, then westward into Pennsylvania and Virginia, then finally into Kentucky—where the Indians, indeed, were not particularly happy to see them.
Fighting ensued, but in time the frontier quieted, only to be opened to land speculators, traders, lawyers. Those were the very people that the chronically impoverished, star-crossed farmer Thomas Lincoln had kept on moving to avoid. One of Abraham’s earliest memories was a flash flood that came sweeping down Knob Creek and wiped out his father’s crop of corn and beans. What Abraham did not know was that his father had not filed a proper claim on the land he was farming, and in 1816, when Abraham was just seven years old, a neighbor who knew the law filled out the proper paperwork and forced the Lincolns from their homestead.
The neighbors knew Thomas for a hard-luck case, and they whispered about his wife, Nancy Hanks, who, they said, had been born out of wedlock and never knew her father. Nancy did not much care for them, either. She had a hard view of life and a sad disposition, and she read her Bible constantly, convinced that any reward she was likely to receive would be in another life. Her son would inherit her melancholy nature, but Nancy was a good and loving mother all the same.
Thomas moved the family across the Ohio River, to where he and they were strangers. He found unclaimed property in the thickly forested limestone country some 60 miles west of what was then the capital of Indiana Territory, a little town called Corydon. Indiana became a state, folklore holds, on the very day that the Lincolns arrived: December 11, 1816. Abraham never knew the exact date, though, for his mother told him only that they crossed the river sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas of that cold year.
Thomas Lincoln was not an ambitious man, not driven to acquire wealth and consume things, but he was willing to work hard for his family. On the banks of Pigeon Creek, he cleared a couple of acres of sandy land, planted corn, built a chicken coop and a pigpen, and set to work putting up a log cabin very much like the one in which Abraham had been born. We moderns tend to think of log cabins as rickety, drafty, creaky affairs, but that is because we know them mostly as ruins; in fact, the one that Thomas built was small but sturdy and for the most part weatherproof, providing shelter from the bitter cold winters and the sweltering summers alike. Visitors to the site, what is now the Abraham Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial near Lincoln City, Indiana, can see for themselves what a good job Thomas did. There the homestead is maintained as the Lincolns would have known it, with a living-history museum housed in a cabin built on the exact plan of the original, which was torn down in the 1920s.
If Thomas was not ambitious in the strictest sense, he and Nancy recognized that in Abraham they had a talented and diligent son. Nancy encouraged him to read and taught him to write, and the Lincolns did not seem to mind that Abraham scrawled all over every available surface with charcoal, developing in time confident penmanship that served him well when, as a young man, he set out as a law clerk.
Nancy Hanks died young, as so many did on the frontier; illness took her at the age of 35, when Abraham was just shy of 10. He buried his grief in two forms that would characterize him in adulthood: he read, and he worked—carving, among other things, the wooden pegs that would seal his mother’s coffin lid shut. Young Abraham threw himself into books, reading and rereading such favorites as Aesop’s Fables and The Arabian Nights. Along with the Bible, the former equipped him with a stock of moral lessons with which he would pepper his legal arguments and speeches in the years to come; the latter gave him a treasure trove of stories that he could entertain listeners with over the fire of an evening, and storytelling was a talent much prized in those days before mass entertainment came along.
When he was about 12, Abraham happened upon a book that would have a profound influence on him: the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, who worked his way out of poverty to become one of the leaders of his revolutionary generation. Franklin set an example for young Abraham, who had been none too ambitious himself. Now he burned with a determination to improve himself constantly, never waste a moment, and become somebody.
That program of self-improvement met with a naturally good character. By the time Abraham was ready to leave the Pigeon Creek homestead, he stood 6′4″ and cut an instantly recognizable figure. “All old settlers,” one neighbor remarked years later, “will testify to the uniform urbanity, integrity of character, industry, and good sense that characterized his boyhood.” There on the American frontier, Abraham Lincoln acquired the fine qualities that would distinguish him as a man—and for which he is so rightly honored to this day.
